


Vine Medicine

by JupiterIsaJellyfish



Category: Vine (kinda), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Keith (Voltron) is a Good Friend, Kinda, Shiro lives by clean vines, broganes, my poor sweet children, what even is tone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 01:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14093904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JupiterIsaJellyfish/pseuds/JupiterIsaJellyfish
Summary: The night they rescue Shiro, everyone ends up piled in Keith's shack for the night. Shiro's anesthetic wears off but Keith finds a way to prove he's with friends again.





	Vine Medicine

It was 2am when the shack went quiet. Keith and Lance had hauled Shiro into the only room in the shack with a door, the bathroom, at about 11pm. Then Keith had stripped his couch bed of most of the pillows and blankets, thrown them into the chipping bathtub, and heaved Shiro into the makeshift nest.

After a bit of hushed shouting involving the couch, several rude gestures, and two dozen spilled thumbtacks, Keith got the three strangers piled up in the living room sharing two blankets. Now it was 3am, and Keith was the only one awake.

He sat by the old tub, forehead accruing rust stains and yellowed porcelain sand. Shiro’s breathing was unsteady. He hadn’t noticed during the rush of escaping the crash site, but Shiro’s lax face disguised the hiccuping staccato of his lungs. Bad dreams? Probably. 

Keith didn’t know what in the Sam Hill to make of it all. He’d all but scrubbed his mind of finding his ‘dead’ best friend- his only (kinda) family. Even if he didn’t buy for a second that Shiro had crashed his crew, Keith had no way of seeing him again. That’s what he’d assumed anyway. This new, bizarre project of his had consumed his life. Maybe it would heal him, replacing an irreplaceable person with an impossible task, or at least it might make something of nothing. But he here was, in his desert riddled shack, with his dead brother having a panic attack in his bathtub. 

Suddenly Shiro groaned. Keith shot up onto his knees and searched Shiro’s face. Shiro’s eyes were squeezed tight and he grimaced, teeth holding back a keening sound. All at once his eyes opened to the dusky darkness, in a small room, in a bathtub. 

“Uhm… Huh? What… what’s…” Shiro’s eyes widened as he gasped, painful and afraid, “They’re coming! They’re coming to Earth, please, we can’t let them-“ He cut himself off with an aching sound, reaching his left hand up to massage his temple. 

“Shiro, it’s me, Keith” Keith whispered, frozen despite the wrath of his kneecaps. Shiro seemed to register a voice, but his faith in its source appeared limited.   
“Keith? What? No… no you shouldn’t be here, you should be…” Shiro’s breathing quickened it’s pace dangerously. 

It stirred Keith into action. Forcing himself to stand, he quickly and quietly left the bathroom and rushed back into the living room. The three garrison students were collapsed in a heap on the couch, the little one curled up off to the side while skinny lay sprawled on top of the big guy. 

Keith tread as delicately as he could as he snuck around them to the bookshelf of radio equipment. There, plugged into the only outlet in the house, was his laptop. He grabbed it and crept back towards the bathroom. 

Keith closed the door gently, then went back to sit by the bathtub. He turned on the laptop, entered his password (password backwards) and pulled up one of his bookmarked files. The brightness tried to creep up but Keith lowered it manually and placed the laptop on Shiro’s lap. As the video loaded, Keith placed a gentle hand on Shiro’s arm.

“Shiro, you’re home. I don’t know what happened to you, but you’re back on Earth. You’re in a bathroom in my house” he said as evenly and gently as he could. Finally the grey bar frogged across the black one and the old stolen video started playing at a sensible volume. 

One of the benefits to knowing Shiro personally was knowing about Shiro’s frankly disgusting hoard of ancient memes and library of old clips. They’d spent untold hours trying to be productive against “Wook at all those chickens” and “Hi, welcome to Chili’s!”. It was a subject Shiro knew as expertly as he knew how to not crash a revolutionary space expedition. 

Keith held his breath as the nature of the compilation started to set in. Shiro was still tense, leaning back as though though something would jump out and strike at him, but his gaze stayed glued to the screen. Slowly, as a basset hound was compelled by the Power of Christ and the Sand Guardian- Guardian of the Sand- taunted the ocean, Shiro began to relax. 

Keith didn’t have access to the internet, but he’d seized the opportunity to illegally download a half dozen or so somewhat-clean vine compilations onto his aging computer. It had taken three separate trips to Starbucks for free WiFi and several hours of people watching between digging, but he’d found what he needed. 

Whenever his search for the mysterious energy source started to frustrate him, he’d turn on those videos. They relaxed him with their mindlessness, and gave him a connection to his fellow man. Nothing summed up the human condition like not even knowing which way the Quiznos is. 

Around the time ‘Megan’ started choking on fudge stripes, Shiro glanced up at Keith. 

“I guess I’m really back, huh?”

“Yeah”. 

Shiro took a deep breath, easing into a more comfortable position. A moment after “Dah-dy?’... ‘Do I LOOK-?”, Keith heard him sigh and mutter “I love humans”. 

They let the video finish and load into the next one. Something liminal permeated the bathroom. It was a sense of being outside of reality but with your nose pressed up against the window into it, watching people get smacked in the face by pizza trays.

As soon as the video started, Keith remembered this wasn’t one of the clean ones. He reached over and skipped it, earning a raised eyebrow from Shiro. 

“They curse a lot in that one” Keith muttered. 

Shiro swore by clean vines. 

Shiro cracked a smile. “Two shots… of vodka” later he even chuckled.

——

When Pidge slunk into the bathroom at 4:30am to brush her teeth, she found Keith slumped over the side of the tub, cheek squished up against a smoother patch of porcelain. Shiro was still asleep in the tub, but the laptop perched on his leg wasn’t. Pidge leaned over Keith to peer at the frozen screen and saw a floppy haired guy on the ground next to the remains of a free taco. She shorted generously, did her business, and left as quietly as she could.

**Author's Note:**

> I was procrastinating by watching vine comps, like you do, when I decided to procrastinate my procrastinating by writing this! Procrastiception. Anywho, hope y'all enjoyed it. You can find me on tumblr @jupitermumbles but its a bit of a barren wasteland :/


End file.
